The Roots of the Mountain

The first step towards the characteristic large-scale fantasies which have had such influence on the genre -- and indirectly on [science fiction] -- is The House of the Wolfings (1889). Here the setting is quasi-historical: a European Saxon community is resisting the decadent advances of late-Imperial Rome. The romantic-supernatural story contains a large admixture of verse. What later critics were to call The Teutonic thing or the Northern thing continued in The Roots of the Mountain (1890) another tale of a tribal communicty whose historical context is less definite. -- The Encyclopedia of Fantasy